At first glance, the murders seemed unrelated, even as they both concerned employees of the accounting firm of Slater & Knott. First, the rather antisocial office worker Victor Harleston dies of poison at the breakfast table; and then, after paying a visit to the Torquay home of his business partner, Edwin Knott disappears, along with a tidy sum of cash that he was carrying for deposit. In the former death, Superintendent Hanslet strongly suspects Harleston’s half-brother Philip; in the latter, all signs point to the founder’s temperamental son, Gavin Slater. Along with Junior Station-Inspector Jimmy Waghorn, Hanslet becomes more and more mystified until he consults Dr. Priestley, who is able to see the events from a new and enlightening perspective.

John Rhode’s mysteries are never exactly confounding, but Death at Breakfast offers a number of ancillary puzzles that are specific and intriguing: who was the unknown man outside the house on the morning of Harleston’s murder? How was the victim poisoned with nicotine-laced coffee if a report shows no ingestion of the substance in his stomach? Why did the two partners differ so in their view of the firm’s financial status? Who drew a crude picture of a gun on a wall at a potential crime scene, and why? As Dr. Priestley stories go, this one is lengthy but enjoyable, with a great amount of theorizing from Hanslet and Waghorn and a solution that will likely be as obvious to the seasoned reader of detective stories as it is to the quiet but correct doctor.

Adding to the padding is an interesting (if unnecessary to the plot) and detailed account of a 19th century European nicotine poisoning case. This true-crime anecdote certainly appears to be a source of inspiration to the author here, and he allows Jimmy Waghorn to expound for pages over similarities between the murder he is investigating and the poisoning of Gustave Fougnies by his sister and brother-in-law in 1850. Certainly the Comte and Comtesse de Bocarmé were less imaginative in their approach to murder – overpowering and forcing their victim to swallow the stuff – than Rhode’s resourceful villain in Death at Breakfast.

This was the first Dr. Priestley mystery I experienced as an audiobook, and John Rhode’s unadorned reportage style of storytelling makes for an easy listening experience. Many thanks to Anna M. of Germany, who brought the author’s titles on audiobook to my attention!

There was one aspect that may have been made more prominent because I was listening to a reader performing each character’s dialogue, but it is a common element of some Golden Age Detective fiction, and of Rhode’s books in particular. Superintendent Hanslet assumes the rather utilitarian role that many official police characters perform in these stories: he is very capable of collecting evidence and advancing theories, but his energy with these tasks is directly proportional to the limits of his thinking. (This must be so in order for the brilliant amateur detective to take the reins and deliver the solution before the plodding copper can.) The paradox here is that Rhode paints Hanslet as a man who, upon hearing that feline blood is found at the scene of a mighty fight inside a room, has a mind nimble enough to imagine a tussle with an escaped tiger may have occurred, but is not intuitive enough to think that a person may have used cat’s blood for the purposes of misdirection. It’s a strange tightrope walk between intelligence and ignorance, and I’m not sure that the author keeps his character convincingly in the air at all times.

Still, for classic mystery fans Death at Breakfast has much to recommend. For Cecil John Charles Street, whose devilishly prolific nature meant that this was just one of five novels he published in the year 1936 alone under the John Rhode and Miles Burton pseudonyms, there’s much to admire in his presentation of a straightforward (if lengthy) murder puzzle well told. You can find other online reviews of this title by equally prolific (and perhaps devilish) GAD experts Nick Fuller, Martin Edwards, Aidan, and The Puzzle Doctor.